Inktomi Corporation, Cisco Systems Inc., and CacheFlow (now Blue Coat Systems, Inc.) have manufactured various solutions for use in Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), including cache devices and Content Distribution Managers (CDMs), with accompanying software. Some of these solutions provide a management tool for homogeneous caches. U.S. Pat. No. 6,442,651 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,263,371 assigned to CacheFlow, U.S. Pat. No. 6,128,623 assigned to Inktomi Corporation, U.S. Pat. No. 6,449,647 assigned to Cisco Systems Inc., and U.S. Pat. No. 6,421,726 assigned to Akamai Technologies Inc. describe various aspects of data networks and are hereby incorporated by reference.
These solutions do not manage heterogeneous equipment, such as equipment from different manufacturers, all running in the same environment, and don't present a complete, logical management model to an administrator.